History
In 1992, local gallery owner Laura Carpenter conceived the idea of SITE Santa Fe, soliciting donations that would eventually total more than $1 million. A third of the collected funds went into the renovation of a rail side warehouse into 19,000 feet of exhibition space by New York architect Richard Gluckman. [1]
SITE Santa Fe, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, [1] was started in 1995 with the goal of hosting the only biennial of contemporary art in the entire United States. For the biennial's first edition, Ferguson and co-curator Vince Varga selected 31 artists, from 13 different countries to participate. [1]
The first of these biennials was launched on July 14, 1995, and ran through October 8, 1995. Over the years, SITE's International Biennial has featured guest curators including Bruce W. Ferguson (1995), Francesco Bonami (1997), Rosa Martinez (1999), Dave Kickey (2001), Robert Storr (2004), Klaus Ottomann (2006), Lance Fung (2008), and Daniel Belasco and Sarah Lewis (2010). Following the success of the first biennial, SITE Santa Fe opted to present exhibitions on an ongoing basis.
SITE Santa Fe also administers grants to local artists and holds ancillary programs in education and development. [1]
In 1997, SITE Santa Fe served as commissioning institution for the United States pavilion at the Venice Biennale. [2]
The seventh biennial, Lucky Number Seven, opened on Lucky Number Seven, opened June 22, 2008. The exhibit, curated by Lance Fung, featured the work of 25 artists from 16 different countries. The exhibition was documented online by a student documentary team from the Media Arts Program at New Mexico Highlands University, the New Media Arts Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and other local arts programs. Many community members collaborate with SITE Santa Fe, such as Deborah Fritz, a local curator and gallerist. [3]
In 2011, SITE's leadership set out to reimagine its signature biennial exhibition. SITE lines: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas, the first of the reimagined biennials, was organized by a diverse team of curators and featured artworks that explore the many layers of history and culture in the Western hemisphere, highlighting under-recognized points of view. Simultaneously, SITE developed SITE Center, a socially engaged artist residency program that ties the curatorial process of SITE lines and outreach programs that foster deeper engagement within New Mexico communities. SITE Center residencies have addressed topics such as cultural differences, Indigenous histories, and incarceration.
In the summer of 2016, SITE broke ground on an expansion and renovation project designed by Shop Architects. After a year of construction, SITE reopened with a new building that increased the museum's capacity to display art work, host events, and engage with local students.
The Venice Biennale is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy, by the Biennale Foundation. It focuses on contemporary art, and includes events for art, contemporary dance, architecture, cinema, and theatre. Two main components of the festival are known as the Art Biennale and the Architecture Biennale, which are held in alternating years. The others – Biennale Musica, Biennale Teatro, Venice Film Festival, and Venice Dance Biennale – are held annually. The main exhibition is held in Castello and has around 30 permanent pavilions built by different countries.
Rosa Martínez is an independent curator, art critic and international art advisor based in Barcelona, Spain.
Leo Asemota is a contemporary artist living and working in London, England. Asemota employs photography, film and video, performance, sculpture, drawings and various progressions in his work.
Jens Hoffmann Mesén is a writer, editor, educator, and exhibition maker. His work has attempted to expand the definition and context of exhibition making. From 2003 to 2007 Hoffmann was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. He is the former director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art from 2007 to 2016 and deputy director for exhibitions and programs at The Jewish Museum from 2012 to 2017, a role from which he was terminated following an investigation into sexual harassment allegations brought forth by staff members. Hoffmann has held several teaching positions including California College of the Arts, the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as others.
The Ben Maltz Gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design was an art space in Los Angeles, California, that closed permanently in 2020.
The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is a museum in Zhongshan District, Taipei, Taiwan. It is in the Taipei Expo Park. The museum first opened on August 8, 1983, at the former site of the United States Taiwan Defense Command. It was the first museum in Taiwan built for contemporary art exhibitions. The architecture is a local interpretation of the Japanese Metabolist Movement, and the building was designed by architect Kao Er-Pan.
Basak Senova is an art curator, writer and designer from Istanbul, Turkey. She lives and works in Vienna since 2017.
Vasif Kortun is a curator, writer and educator in the field of contemporary art, its institutions, and exhibition practices. Kortun served as the founding director of several international institutions, including SALT, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Proje4L, and the Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. In 2006, he received the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies for his "experimental approach and openness to new ideas to challenge the contemporary art world and push its parameters beyond national or international, local or global developments." Kortun has written extensively on contemporary art and visual culture in Turkey for publications and periodicals internationally. He currently lives in Ayvalık, a seaside town on the northwestern Aegean coast of Turkey.
Nora Naranjo Morse is a Native American artist and poet. She currently resides in Española, New Mexico just north of Santa Fe and is a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, part of the Tewa people. Her work can be found in several museum collections including the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota, and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, where her hand-built sculpture piece, Always Becoming, was selected from more than 55 entries submitted by Native artists as the winner of an outdoor sculpture competition held in 2005. In 2014, she was honored with a NACF Artist Fellowship for Visual Arts and was selected to prepare temporal public art for the 5x5 Project by curator Lance Fung.
Peter Sarkisian is an American new media artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He combines video projection and sculpture to create hybrid-format, multi-media installations.
The contemporary art institution Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center opened in 2001 and was located on the pedestrian Istiklal Avenue in Istanbul, Turkey. Platform Garanti organized exhibitions; conferences and events; hosted an international residency program; and maintained a library and archive of contemporary art.
America Meredith is a painter, curator, educator, and editor of First American Art Magazine. America Meredith is an artist and comes from a Swedish-Cherokee background who blends pop imagery from her childhood with European and Native American styles.
Naomi Beckwith is an American art historian who has been serving as the deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum since 2021. Previously she had been the senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Beckwith joined the curatorial staff there in May 2011.
M12, aka M12 STUDIO, is an American artist collective and non-profit organization that features an evolving group of artist practitioners, curators, designers, researchers, and writers. Now based in Colorado, the collective creates artworks, research projects, and education programs that explore rural cultures and landscapes. After meeting at Indiana University in 2000 the collective was initially formed as the municipalWORKSHOP in 2002 in York, Alabama by Richard Saxton when he was an artist-in-residence at the Rural Studio, an architecture studio run by Auburn University. The group evolved into M12 in 2007 when it became incorporated as a non-profit organization. The evolving group of core members have created over 35 projects since the collective's founding. M12 has been featured in numerous publications including Lucy Lippard's 2014 book "Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West," the Whitechapel Gallery's 2019 anthology "Documents of Contemporary Art: The Rural" featuring Kirsten Stoltz's essay "A Country Social: M12 on the American High Plains," the 2014 publication "A Decade of Country Hits: Art on the Rural Frontier," as well as Josh Garrett-Davis' 2019 book "What is a Western?" and many more books, publications, and recordings. The artist collective has been featured in a variety of exhibitions including The Breaking Ring, at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Going with the Flow, SITE Santa Fe, NM; The 13th International Venice Biennale of Architecture, Venice, Italy; The 21st International Art Biennial of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia; and Lone Prairie at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design; among others. M12 has received a wide variety of awards including from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The National Endowment for the Arts; Colorado Creative Industries; The Gates Family Foundation; The Indianapolis Community Foundation; and the Minneapolis Foundation, among others.
Sergio Edelsztein founded and curated the Artifact Gallery, the International Video Art Biennale and Videozone, and also founded the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, in 1997.
Anne Barlow is a curator and director in the field of international contemporary art, and is currently Director of Tate St Ives, Art Fund Museum of the Year 2018. There she directs and oversees the artistic vision and programme, including temporary exhibitions, collection displays, artist residencies, new commissions, and a learning and research programme. At Tate St Ives, Barlow has curated solo exhibitions of work by artists including: Outi Pieski (2024); Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (2023); Burçak Bingöl (2022); Prabhakar Pachpute (2022); Thảo Nguyên Phan (2022); Petrit Halilaj (2021); Haegue Yang (2020); Otobong Nkanga (2019); Huguette Caland (2019); Amie Siegel (2018) and Rana Begum (2018). She was also co-curator of "Naum Gabo: Constructions for Real Life" (2020) and collaborating curator with Castello di Rivoli, Turin for Anna Boghiguian at Tate St Ives (2019).
Candice Hopkins is a Carcross/Tagish First Nation independent curator, writer, and researcher who predominantly explores areas of art by Indigenous peoples. She is the executive director and chief curator at the Forge Project in New York.
Natalie King is an Australian curator and writer working in Melbourne, Australia. She specializes in Australian and international programs for contemporary art and visual culture. This includes exhibitions, publications, workshops, lectures and cultural partnerships across contemporary art and indigenous culture.
Courtney M. Leonard is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and activist from the Shinnecock Nation in Long Island, New York. Her work revolves around issues of ecology and Native identity, specifically their intersection with water, which is essential to the Shinnecock. Leonard primarily uses clay and her ceramic artwork has been inspired by the whaling coastal culture of the Shinnecock Nation. She has contributed to the Offshore Art Movement and now focuses on her work, BREACH, which is centered on environmental sustainability.
James Drake is an American interdisciplinary and visual artist known for his works across various mediums such as drawing, video, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and installations. Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, his work examines themes related to the human condition, communication systems, and socio-political issues.
